Conventionally, in a wireless local area network (LAN) system, a propagation loss, shadowing, fading, collision of frames or the like may occur, and thus a phenomenon in which a receiver fails to receive a frame transmitted from a transmitter may occur. To cope with such a phenomenon, there are cases where retransmission control using acknowledgment (ACK) and negative acknowledgment (NACK) are employed in some cases in a wireless LAN system. In a retransmission control technique using a response from a receiving side, there are cases where a delivery acknowledgment including information indicating success or failure of data reception is returned from the receiving side in response to a delivery confirmation request from a data transmitting side. As one of the above, there is retransmission control using a Block ACK Request (BAR) frame and a Block ACK (BA) frame that enables collective execution of reception confirmation of one or more transmission frames.
Here, IEEE802.11aa, which is one of the standards related to the wireless LAN defines technology for performing retransmission control using a BAR and a BA between a master device (access point (AP)) and a slave device (station (STA)). Specifically, a technique is defined in which an AP unicasts a BAR to a plurality of STAs belonging to a multicast group and receives a BA from an STA to perform retransmission control related to multicasting. According to the present technology, in a case where the number of STAs belonging to a multicast group is small, a highly reliable wireless communication environment can be implemented for example with the AP transmitting a BAR to all the STAs and receiving a BA from all the STAs. However, in a case where the number of STAs belonging to a multicast group is large, a throughput may be deteriorated due to an overhead of transmission and reception of BARs and BAs.
With respect to the technique described above, for example, a technique is disclosed in which STAs of a multicast group are grouped, and transmission and reception of a BAR and a BA are performed only on a representative terminal set for each group (for example, see Patent Document 1).